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SpaceX's Starship reached orbit for the first time on Flight 14, lifting off from Starbase, Texas at 12:49 GMT (8:49 a.m. EDT) after 13 prior suborbital or partial-orbital attempts. The vehicle deployed 26 second-generation Starlink V3 satellites. One of the ship's Raptor 3 engines shut down early during ascent, but the vehicle compensated and still reached orbital insertion at roughly 170 miles (275 km) altitude. The mission was shortened to about 3 hours 9 minutes versus a planned roughly 10 hours, with an early deorbit burn; both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship upper stage completed controlled splashdowns in the ocean, with no tower-catch attempted on this flight.

Satellite manufacturer and operator Astro Digital announced it will go public via a merger with Proem Acquisition Corp I (Nasdaq: PAAC), forming a new company, Astro Digital Holdings, Inc. The deal values Astro Digital at roughly $587 million pro forma enterprise value, with up to $180 million in gross proceeds available from Proem's trust account and a targeted PIPE. Proem Asset Management's Imran Khan, formerly Snap's chief strategy officer, is committing $25 million and joining the board. Astro Digital has delivered nearly 40 satellites since 2018 for customers including NASA, the DoD, Boeing and Sony, and existing shareholders are expected to retain about 70% pro forma ownership. The deal is expected to close in Q1 2027.

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Firefly Aerospace completed a new, roughly 4x-larger ISO Class 8 cleanroom at its Cedar Park, Texas campus, funded in part by a Texas Space Commission grant. The combined facility can now support production of up to 12 lunar landers or orbital vehicles simultaneously. COO Ramon Sanchez spoke at the ribbon-cutting alongside NASA and state officials.

Spire Global was awarded a $33.2 million NOAA task order to supply GNSS radio-occultation weather data, with a performance period running December 2026 to December 2028 and potential value up to roughly $66 million if options are exercised. The award falls under NOAA's broader $8 billion-ceiling Space-Based Environmental Monitoring contract.

Planet Labs announced plans for a new satellite factory in Berlin, Germany, to build Pelican-class satellites at a rate of up to 60 per year, doubling the company's worldwide production capacity. The move is tied to Germany's growing defense-space budget.

The U.S. Space Development Agency issued a $369 million solicitation for its "Resilient Missile Warning and Tracking LEO Ground Entry Points" program, seeking 5 to 8 new ground stations worldwide plus modernization of up to four existing ones to support the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture. Proposals are due late 2026, with awards expected in early 2027.

Impulse Space was awarded $28 million by the U.S. Space Force, including a $19.75 million APFIT FY26 award, for a space-domain-awareness mission. The company's Mira spacecraft will host an MIT Lincoln Laboratory optical payload to monitor objects in geostationary orbit, with launch targeted no earlier than 2029. President and COO Eric Romo commented on the award.

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Rocket Lab launched its 16th Electron mission of 2026, "Happily Ever Faster," lifting off from Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand at 3:28 a.m. UTC and deploying a single Earth-observation satellite for an undisclosed customer into a 500 km orbit, the company's 95th Electron flight overall.

Rocket Lab also filed a formal protest with the U.S. Government Accountability Office challenging NASA's award of a roughly $700 million Mars telecommunications-orbiter contract to Blue Origin.

Arianespace announced its largest order intake since Ariane 6 entered service, securing seven new agreements at the International Space Summit in Paris covering around ten Ariane 64 launches: Amazon Leo expanded its booking from 18 to 24 launches through 2031, Eutelsat added two launches for 2027-28 to renew its OneWeb constellation, The Exploration Company booked an Ariane 64 flight for a Nyx capsule demonstration under ESA's ALADDIN program, and KT SAT booked a 2028 geostationary satellite launch, alongside new cooperation MOUs with ICEYE, EnduroSat and AgenaSpace.

A SpaceX executive confirmed in Paris that the company's next Starship flight will carry its first orbital payloads, Starlink satellites, marking the vehicle's shift from test flights to deploying operational hardware.

KULR Technology disclosed in an 8-K filing that it completed the liquidation of its bitcoin treasury, selling its remaining roughly 764 BTC in transactions spanning August 20 to September 11 for about $58.6 million in gross proceeds, and separately disclosed a 200,000-RSU grant to its CFO.

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SpaceX launched the classified USSF-153 mission for the U.S. Space Force aboard a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base, lifting off at 15:42 UTC. The first-stage booster, on its 27th flight, landed successfully on a droneship in the Pacific.

Day two of the International Space Summit in Paris produced a wave of European space-investment announcements. Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen called for pooled EU space investment, with more than €20 billion in deals signed across the two-day summit and €35 billion earmarked for space security and defense. Macron also proposed a €10 billion, ten-year plan for Europe to gain autonomous crewed spaceflight capability, targeting a first crewed launch from Kourou within a decade, while the IRIS² secure-connectivity constellation was expanded to more than 350 satellites. SpaceX, Blue Origin, Stoke Space and Starcloud boycotted the summit after a White House OSTP official discouraged US firms from attending.

At the same summit, Eutelsat ordered 229 additional OneWeb satellites from Airbus to expand its LEO network, and French firms signed several agreements with Indian space companies, including a contract worth more than €5 million between Safran Space France and Dhruva Space to supply communications, navigation and optical hardware for India's 52-satellite SBS-III surveillance constellation.

York Space Systems won a $187 million contract from Tomorrow.io to build the initial phase of the DeepSky AI-native weather satellite constellation using York's M-CLASS platform.

MDA Space unveiled MDA AURORA BLACK, a defense-focused, software-defined satellite variant built for secure military satellite communications, with CEO Mike Greenley pitching it for "sovereign military satellite communications."

Satellogic's newly appointed President, Trey Whitworth, filed a Form 3 with the SEC reporting zero beneficial share ownership.

NASA and IBM released an open-source "Lunar Foundation Model," an AI model trained on roughly 2 million lunar image tiles from missions including the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and GRAIL, built to improve identification of lunar surface features.

The U.S. State Department launched a "Space Catalyst Partnership" in Lima, Peru, aimed at expanding civil and commercial space cooperation with Artemis Accords signatories, starting with a $6.5 million rural-connectivity pilot project.

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